Vancouver: Magic Skeletons

Strolling up and down the skeleton course, on Friday night at the Whistler Sliding Centre, brought to mind the motor-race scene in “Vile Bodies,” except in place of Waugh’s dissolute Bright Young Things there were little pods of scraggly snowboarder dudes, in low-slung stovepipe jeans, ironic toques, and reflector shades, drinking beer and making droll remarks. In the novel, the race is a peripheral and bewildering spectacle; the protagonists are basically oblivious to it. At the sled track, the skeletons (sorry, I’m calling them that) zipped by like mail canisters in a pneumatic tube, and it was easy to get distracted by the socializing along the edge of the track. If you are standing at a turn, you hear a rumble—the sled approaching—and then a streak of color shoots past, so fast you’re hardly sure you saw it. You can get really close. If you’re used to luge (and who isn’t, by now?), the fact that the skeleton sledders are face down and face first (as opposed to face up and foot first) is disorienting; they look like mannequins being flung down the course in a Letterman segment—their feet are all floppy. It’s amazing that TV can catch any of it; wasn’t there a movie in which a camera, and only a camera, could capture images of ghosts? In fact, nearly everyone I saw there was playing the game of trying to snap a photo of each passing sledder. I tried, too. I got a few but the pictures don’t tell you much. (I can photograph Olympians about as well as I can compare them to things that they are not.) I also took a photo of the turn where the Georgian luger crashed and died a week before. I’ve had trouble forgetting that sound of clanging metal. An Olympic sledding race, like Waugh’s car race, can end horribly.

This one did not. Its climax, wouldn’t you know it, was a winning run by a racer from England—the first British medal of the Games. Her name is Amy Williams, and I don’t know anything about her, and by gum I’m not going to diminish her accomplishment, the breadth of her life and the toil of all that training, by reducing her to Google data. If I’d been in the stands at the finish, or watching on TV in the press center, I’d have seen her make that last turn (the aforementioned deadly one) and hurtle uphill, in the slowdown stretch (it is disorienting at first to discover that the last portion of the race course begins way below the finish; they need a lot of uphill to kill their speed), then into a bundle of foam padding, at which point she’d have dismounted and seen her time and jumped in the air with joy, as an announcer filled me in on her bio. Instead, like everyone else along the course, I saw a blur go by on turn eleven, and exchanged wide-eyed looks and shakes of the head with a bunch of jibbers from Squamish, and then proceeded along to turn twelve. In some ways, the skeleton race was a microcosm of my entire experience of the Games.

Speaking of foam and the English: later that evening, down in Whistler Village, at the Savage Beagle pub, which has been rechristened the Jamaican Bobsleigh House for the duration of the Games, a man named Stephen Mills, brandishing the flag of St. George, hooted about Britain’s big win. Then he took out a deck of cards. Turns out he’s a magician—Magic Steve, Illusionista—and a damn good one. He performed some Olympic-calibre tricks, in exchange for tequila shots. He lives on Ibiza but had come to Whistler for a month to work the Games, to make some money in advance of the birth of his first child, due in five months. “I can’t wait to teach my boys my secrets,” he said. He wasn’t going to share them with any of us.

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.